Lost and Mostly Forgotten 1915 Business Advertising in our home towns of Fort William and Port Arthur.....

     As luck would have it, a donation to the HR&J Blog pages by my wife's cousin Mike last year has prompted me to get busy, and away from Facebook for a bit.  Writing on these pages has become tedious as of late due to the fact that there are so many history pages with photos on Facebook, and its tough to find something original to post and write about.
     One may forget that the Hot Rods and Jalopies generation blog pages was the first to publish on line stories and photos of our home towns of Fort William and Port Arthur.  Thank you to all our loyal followers and those who write in and give us ideas and photos to publish.
So....the donation was a compilation of 1915 "The Daily Times Journal" newspapers from April 1, 1915 until June 30, 1915, 103 years ago as we speak.  The stories of WWI are compelling but too intense to write about here, as well as the total history of the sinking of the Lusitania.  To start, I decided to concentrate on interesting advertising with a few follow-up stories to go with them.  The first three photos are of only one title page of all the ones bound in this book.  It is the TJ cover for May 10, 1915.....each photo just a little closer.  Click on all photos for enlargements....

     Next...Here is an advertisement for the ill-fated Luxury Cruise Ship The Noronic.   A 1915 clip advertising the Noronic's Red Cross Night at the CNR Dock (now part of Marina Park) in Port Arthur.
The Noronic was built by CSL and launched in Port Arthur on June 2, 1913, only two years before this ad was published in our paper.  It was a Spectacular Luxury Great Lakes cruise ship.

                                                                                                                                                                   One of the largest and most beautiful passenger ships in Canada at the time, she was nicknamed “The Queen of the Lakes."  The picture on the left below was taken in Toronto Harbour in about 1930....but the doomed ship met it's final demise also in Toronto Harbour in a devastating fire that took place on the fateful night of September 17th 1949 at Pier 9.  118 people perished in that fire.
More details by clicking here on a link to Wikipedia.
    

Now for some old 1915 advertising.  Some of the actual locations were difficult to find, but with old phone books and some research...I did my best.  The farm produce market was located about halfway between The Superior Bowling Alley and Leith St., at 202 N. May Street....a location very close to where the Goodyear Tire Store was in the most current photo below.

The spot would be where the words "Tire Centre" is.

Climax Grocery was a very popular place to do ones grocery shopping in 1915.  Their ad's appeared 2-4 times in each day's newspaper......it's interesting to compare over 103 years what was sold and what the prices were.

Here's the original location of The Climax Grocery on 113 S. May St. in the present day Dyke Block which was built in 1904.

The RS Piper Company on 1515 Brown St is one of the original hardware stores in West Fort William, but it also was a Grocery Store in 1915 as noted in the advertisement.
























Most of our residential city streets today show little or no sign of businesses like corner stores, service stations, bakeries or shoe repair shops, but in 1915 many businesses were placed right smack dab in residential areas and many businesses were operated out of back lane-ways long before the city changed all its bylaws.  Dominion Bread was a prime example of residential area business.  The address was 132 Ogden Street.  One of my family's first homes was on Ogden St.
So there it was...about 3 houses east from McKenzie Street on the south side.

Chapples Ltd., formerly the Grain Exchange building started out small in 1909, but became one of the Lakehead cities of Fort William and Port Arthur's predominant department stores....finally closing its doors due to the emergence of big box stores, and the conversion of that area of Thunder Bay to another ill fated venture, Victoriaville.  As you can see by the second advertisement, in the spring of 1915 Chapples was celebrating it's 6th anniversary already.  Others claim Chapples started in 1915, but obviously the advertisement doesn't lie.

Here's another West Fort William business advertisement named People's Outfitters in 1915.  It's address was 146 Frederica St., which today would be just adjacent (east) to Schwartz Men's Wear.

The original Heintzman & Co. Piano  building was in a present day burned out area which is still empty.  After The Heintzman Co. moved out of this location at 402 Victoria Ave., this location became a restaurant and eventually there was a fire that destroyed the property never to be built on again.

The two following advertisements both say they are on the corner of Heron and Simpson street, however one was called "Twin City Furniture Store" and the other "A. Gilbert & Company"...possibly later to become Gilbert's furniture which was further north on Simpson St.  It's possible that each of these two businesses were on the north and south side of Heron St. long before the Simpson Hotel was built....and today houses The NorWest Community Health Centre.  I believe the A. Gilbert and Co. was on the property where the Health Centre's addition is today.

This photo was taken before the almost complete block addition to the NorWest CHC building, and where the parking lot is in this photo 527 Simpson St would have been.

Another well known establishment in 1915 was Neville's Drug Store at 215 Simpson St.  It also states that there was another store in the Francis Block.  I have no idea where the Francis block was.

The building at 571-573 Syndicate Ave firstly called Coslett Hardware Co. still exists to this day.  Coslett's was also a very well known business even into the 1950's

Coslett Hardware was also known as a United Service Motors outlet who not only sold hardware for city and farm use but also fuels, such as Naphtha Gas (bottle shown above thanks to Russ Wanzuk), and also did repairs to automobiles and farm equipment.  "Naphtha is a flammable liquid made from distilling petroleum. It looks like gasoline. Naphtha is used to dilute heavy oil to help move it through pipelines, to make high-octane gas, to make lighter fluid, and even to clean metal."
I know it's time for a new CLE racing post...I will try in the near future.....and also possibly more ads from 1915.  Thanks for watching, and if it's your first visit... "WELCOME".  Be sure to check back through the complete blog for memorable stories about our cities and about vintage racing as well.